Bounce Rate
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce Rate Definition:
Bounce rate is the number of single page sessions divided by the number of total sessions for a given landing page. That is to answer the question: For this landing page, what is the % of users who landed on this page and decided to leave?
When Should I Use Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is a common web analytics metric that means to represent the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page. It aims to measure the efficiency of a website in retaining visitors and keeping them engaged with the site's content. A high bounce rate typically indicates that a website is not meeting the needs or expectations of its visitors (causing them to leave after a single page view), while a low bounce rate suggests that visitors are finding the site useful and are exploring multiple pages on the site.
While bounce rate can be a great metric to look at, it can also drive you mad. Many marketing managers and website owners obsess over bounce rate without understanding it’s broader context. Like any other marketing analytics metric, there is a time and place! Two of the best place to use bounce rate as a KPI, in our opinion, are with performance driven landing pages or high-traffic blog URLs.
Landing pages that are driving traffic from paid sources like Facebook Ads and Google Ads should be optimized for conversion. If you have a high bounce rate on your landing pages, that represents a missed opportunity to convert. Making conversion rate optimization (CRO) or UX improvements to the page should naturally reduce bounce rates as well.
Blogs are great for driving top-of-funnel awareness, SEO authority, and social credibility. That said, high-traffic blogs are notorious for having high bounce rates in the range of 80-95%! If you are not doing any type of retargeting of this traffic in paid channels, think of all of those potential customers who are now out of your marketing mix. Yikes. If you have a high bounce rate on your traffic-driving blogs, there is no need to panic. In some ways, there comfort in knowing that high-traffic blogs will generally always result in a very high bounce rate. Your job? Try to keep that bounce rate down if at all possible through contextual CTAs, related content, etc.
What is a Normal Bounce Rate?
A healthy bounce rate will depend a lot on the industry you are in and the content type you are talking about. After working with hundreds of websites in a variety of industries, here are a few healthy bounce rate ranges that may put you at ease:
Homepage: 50-60%
Product Detail Page: 60-70%
Blog Post: 80-90%
Service Overview Page: 50-60%
Landing Page: 70-80%
Please note, your mileage may vary! These are just gut-check ranges to reference. It’s recommended to reach out to colleagues in your field or your marketing agency to get a more accurate assessment of your bounce rate.
Need Help with Your Bounce Rate?
We can help. Surf CRO specializes in marketing analytics and conversion rate optimization services, including reducing bounce rate and improving conversion results through strategic design.
